Category Archive for: Reviews

A look back at the past that contains a look back at the distant past, Top Girls comes across as almost more of a recently-written period play than the 1982 piece that it is. That is a credit to playwright Caryl Churchill’s balanced eye, which captures the tone of the era in which she wrote it without

With an opening act that rocks with ego and overlapping dialogue and grotesque caricature, when the realism sets with its equally vivid, yet profoundly disturbed characters, we in the audience accept the mythology of our own perceptions. We accept the falseness of our own declarations of truth. We accept the battleground called life. It turns

The opening act of Caryl Churchill’s 1982 “Top Girls” is still breathtaking as women ranging from the ninth-century Pope Joan to 13th-century concubine Lady Nijo and Victorian-era explorer Isabella Bird gather for a vivacious dinner party hosted by a modern employment agency manager who is celebrating a promotion. The final act of Thatcher-era class warfare knifes into

Director Abigail Isaac Fine has given audiences a worthy production of Jones’ famous play, perhaps the greatest sign of her talent being her ability to render the many shifts in character and location so seamless that the audience can’t help but go on the whole journey, nearly effortlessly. Stones in his Pockets is a treat, and yet

While the movie [at the center of the plot, The Quiet Valley,] appears to be a fairly inauthentic class-warfare drama involving turf diggers, a precious lady of the manor and a local hero on horseback, the play’s voice rings true. And Keegan Theatre’s production, directed by Abigail Isaac Fine, delivers [playwright Marie] Jones’ dense chorale of

Keegan Theatre has put a nice polish on the 1990s “Stones in His Pockets,” Marie Jones’s two-person comedy about rural Irish townspeople coping with a big budget Hollywood film crew. It’s an actors’ showcase, and Josh Sticklin and Matthew J. Keenan playfully embody everyone from town elders to an American starlet. Keenan is particularly flexible,

Abigail Isaac Fine returns to the Keegan stage to direct this two-hander. Even though the play only has two actors, they play multiple different roles of various ages, genders and histories. This calls for extreme acting chops, and Keegan Theatre did not disappoint. Charlie Conlon, a smooth operator who dreams of producing his own script,

Engaging with warm-hearted humor and disarming in the depth of scenes about lost boys and bitter men with their dreams crushed, the Keegan Theatre production of the Marie Jones’ Stones in his Pockets (1999) is a winner of a serious comedy. Under the affectionate, perceptive direction of Abigail Isaac Fine, Stones in his Pockets aims for and succeeds at understanding; it’s

Written by Belfast-based playwright Marie Jones and first staged in 1996, Stones in His Pocketshas been produced in more than 30 countries—including a successful run on London’s West End—and has garnered numerous awards. Despite being more than 20 years old, Jones’s themes remain strikingly evergreen and relevant today. As the person sitting next to me noted

The show is a winning testament to the impact one man from a tiny town can have on the people who loved him—or even just crossed paths with him for a moment. Even as his son Will (Ricky Drummond, appealing and appropriately stodgy) grows increasingly frustrated with his father’s seemingly tall tales and unwilling tendency to play anything but the hero, the audience gets swept up in Bloom’s impossibly epic version of his own story.